Ukraine Celebration!

We began our week with a celebration of Ukraine. The students enjoyed sampling some traditional foods including perogies, borscht, sauerkraut and sweet cabbage rolls (thanks to Milla's mom)!

The students also learned how to make pysanky using a kistka (pronounced keest-kah) and wax. Thank you to Mrs. Mirau and Mrs. Falkenberg for your help!

We also had a special guest presenter, Mrs. Falkenberg, who taught us some traditional Ukrainian dance steps.

We have finished reading and taking jot notes about Ukraine culture. Next week, we will start creating travel brochures.

We completed another survivor challenge. The students created shapes and learned how to reinforce these shapes to make them stronger. We found that reinforcing other shapes to make triangles, made the shape stronger.

We continued learning multiplication this week. We learned that multiplication is a short version of repeated addition. We practiced writing addition sentences and multiplication sentences to show how many objects were in equal groups. We also learned about arrays and how they can be used to show multiplication. The first number in a multiplication sentence tells the number of rows and the second number tells us how many are in each row.

3 X 4

4 X 3

When students completed their work, they played a new game called Multiplication War, using dominoes. 

They also learned a new game called "Penguin Multiplication". First one to get four "products" in a row, wins!

In Language Arts, we continued our study of Shel Silverstein. We read the poem Headphone Harold. 

Students were then given the same poem with some of the words missing. They were asked to substitute nouns, verbs and adjectives. They loved making their own silly version of the poem. They also had the opportunity to share them with the rest of the class. 

We learned about concrete poems and read "Circle Road". Student then created their own concrete poems, arranging the words in a shape to help convey the meaning of their poem.

This week, we also worked on writing persuasive paragraphs. We read the book "I am the Dog, I am the Cat". As a class, we brainstormed the advantages of having a dog or a cat as a pet. Students then worked on their own to create a paragraph, giving reasons and details to persuade the reader to buy their preferred pet.

For art this week, we wrote "I Wish" sentences, collected a twig from outside and made dandelions out of yarn. They assembled their project blowing "fluff" off of the dandelion, making their wishes.